Category Archives: Political Debate

Over the past week or so, on a few separate occasions, I was reminded of how fear can make people accept the infringement on personal liberties, question the rights of others to exist, and even participate in horrible acts of violence towards others:

with me being German but (luckily) Germany not having been victorious at the end of World War II, I quite often think of how Nazi propaganda was used to instigate fear in the population against both political enemies of the NSDAP and an ethnic group, eventually leading to people either accepting or ignoring the genocide of the Jews

the recently (U.S.-) released movie “The Act of Killing” shows, from the perspective of a group of men who have killed hundreds, how in the mid-1960s the Indonesian population had to endure one of the worst mass-killings, when fears over a communist take-over of the country were used to justify cruel and atrocious acts

even though the Civil Rights Movement changed America forever, to this day people of color, particularly men, are often faced with implicit prejudice about their intention, whether or not they pose a threat, making them the target of even non-police suspicion, as happened when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin

the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine seems to be based on fears on each side that the respective other side’s main motivation is to inflict harm and pain on the own population, leading to ever renewed outbreaks of violent acts, such as bombings and retaliative airstrikes

recent Russian legislation now threatens people who either identify as gay or sympathize with the struggle that gay-identifying persons are facing, with the justification being that homosexuality threatens the Russian society, and the most recent events of a gay man being killed and a Dutch man being detained may just be the beginning of a much larger “campaign” that could result in a lot of violence

And the list could easily be extended… On the outside, the people involved may have strong rational sounding opinions about why the conflict, suppression, or violence continues. Often, the reasons entail a perceived but at least at face value plausible threat to society or individual well-being, and the measures taken are made out to be necessary to restore or uphold peace and justice.

However, in all of these cases, I would argue that the base issue is that one group of a population either already holds the belief or is being made to believe that another group is to be feared because of their intention to cause harm. And these fears then bring about condoning or even participating in the infringement of rights and, in part, even violence against anyone suspected to be part of the feared group.

In some of these instances, there may even be factual reasons to be vigilant. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 actually happened, and it is normal for people suffering such a painful loss to react with fear of subsequent acts of violence. However, what is hardly ever considered is that the people on the “other side” of the conflict who are cheering at the results of these violent acts may be ultimately motivated by the same reason: fear. But is fear truly helpful when it comes to improving a conflict?

And somehow I have the strong hunch that the level on which people “prepare for an attack”, either by individuals buying guns or the legislature passing new laws against a group of people, or entire countries procuring weapons suitable for fighting wars between nations, is relatively unimportant. As long as actions taken by individuals as well as policy makers are based on fear, I believe that violence is no longer the means of last resort but rather the next logical step…

Eventually, I think that if humanity cannot overcome the impulse to translate being afraid of other humans into violence against the group to which those we’re afraid of belong, sooner or later someone will push the big red button and blow us all to pieces. It’s not so much if but rather when, and so I think it’s probably worth investigating how a reduction of fear can be achieved in favor of trying to find “smart solutions”, that do not overlook the actual dangers present, but do not allow the fear of these dangers to dictate decision making.

Let me jump right in, but let me do so by using a short, fictitious story to highlight what I see as a big “issue” of religion:

A man believes he is communicating with God, and God tells him to take a piece of chalk and draw a circular line in the middle of the market place in town. This circle, according to God, is sacred and no-one shall enter it. So, the next day the man goes into town, walks to the center of the market place, and draws the circle as God told him to. Then he sits next to it all day, and he tells everybody who comes by and inquires about the circle that God told him to draw it and make sure no-one enters it. Initially, most of the people don’t think too much about it, but a few are inspired and make sure not to step into the circle, and soon after the man isn’t sitting alone next to the circle, but there is a small group of people sitting there.

Once the group gets a little larger, they become more and more vocal about telling people not to step into the circle, and because people don’t really have a reason to do so, everybody in town begins to follow the rule. Then, one night, the man once again hears God speak to him, and God says that if someone does enter the circle, that person shall be punished by being put to death. And the next day the man tells his followers and they then become convinced that they are righteous in preventing people from stepping into the circle.

However, one day a stranger who has never visited the town comes to the market place and, when he gets to the circle, he doesn’t understand what the line is for. Obviously there is nothing in the circle, there is no good reason not to step into it. He also doesn’t really believe that the good people of the town would actually mind if he steps into it, and because he actually thinks that being in the circle would allow him to breathe a little more freely he steps inside the circle. Then the people of the town become so outraged that they start shouting and yelling, and before anybody can really take a moment to think, someone has picked up a stone and has thrown it at the man in the circle. Once the violence has started, people all around the circle do the same, and it feels good to punish the man, because he has broken the rule.

My questions now are: was it just for the people to kill the man? And if not who is responsible for the man’s death?

Personally, I don’t think the death of the man can be justified. Even if I were to believe God exists and that God has talked to the man who drew the circle, I would then have to say that maybe the man misunderstood God, or that for some other reason God may have wanted to change the rule and didn’t get the chance to talk to the man. In short, I believe that the man should not have been killed.

From that premise, I then wonder who is (mainly) responsible for his death. From a point of a believer in God, you could then simply say the man should have listened, but I also don’t think that this is an adequate point of view, for the same reason as to why I think the death cannot be justified. Given the somewhat imperfect means of how God “chose” to communicate his “wishes”, I think it is at least fair to assume that the error is more likely to be on the human side–even though it would of course be much easier to “blame” the man who died or, alternatively, God for giving out such a rule to begin with.

From the point of an agnostic it becomes much worse. Given that the rule, “draw a circle and no-one shall enter it,” is, indeed, entirely arbitrary–and it also doesn’t come with any good explanation for why following the rule is actually in the interest of the people–it seems that the main portion of the responsibility lies not even with the man who drew the circle but with the people who simply accepted the rule without thought.

And funny enough, I think that is exactly the point that I believe the person or persons that are now usually identified as Jesus of Nazareth tried to make, for which he (or they) was eventually put to death: don’t simply and blindly follow arbitrary rules that some religion sets, but think and feel and then decide from the wisdom of a kind heart that a rule that does not foster well-being and requires that people who not follow it should be punished is unlikely to be a rule that God would want us to follow–presuming that God exists that is.

So, in short, one of the problems I have with organized religion is that it comes with lots and lots of rules, that for many of these rules it only gives “the word of God” as heard by a few select people as “backup”, with little explanation for their benefit, particularly given the continually changing environment we live in. And the rules are not even considered guidelines but absolute.

Sometimes, a white line, such as that at the edge of a road, can be a life-saver. And everybody, even a non-religious person, would likely agree to its value and use. But if a rule, a white line, has lost its value, its meaning–or never had a value or meaning other than for those who made it, because it gives them power over the ruled–then I think it ought to be challenged by someone. And in that sense I do believe that Jesus can be someone to inspire me, just not necessarily in the direction religion points to…

Whew, while I never planned to put in some hiatus in October, I must admit it was nice to take a little break. But now, back to business!

At the beginning of last month, I went to the opening ceremony of Queer Awareness Month (QuAM) at Columbia University, and the keynote speaker, Rebecca Jordan-Young, gave a wonderful talk about how allowing aspects of identity to be defined in possibly overly narrow ways can be harmful to the individuals to which these identities are “applied”. And her insights into how studies on gender identity and sexual orientation in the past have used overly narrow selection criteria in the hope of improving observable differences between groups strongly suggest that the idea of a clear-cut biological mechanism that leads to a “female brain” or a “gay brain” may better be revisited.

Since then, I have been wondering again about where I fit into the “gay world”–or maybe better queer world, using the more general, and less easily defined term–and why people feel such a need to “label” others as well as themselves with more or less narrow and fixed categories at all? And here are some of my thoughts…

Even when I was growing up, I already had a fairly strong sense of not fitting into the mainstream. My parents did not feel any particular urge to play the “follow the fashion” game that seemed to have taken hold in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the German middle-class. A lot of my clothes were inherited from either of my three-and-a-half or five-and-a-half-year older brother, which, given the fact that fashion changed quite a bit between when they and I went to elementary and junior high school, was probably a tell-tale sign of either my parents not giving a damn about fashion or us not having a lot of money. And with young kids being somewhat consciously unaware of issues such as group pressure, my guess is that some of my class mates decided that my family wasn’t too well off… Please don’t get me wrong: that in itself certainly wasn’t the reason for me to feel “queer” (i.e. unusual or maybe even not-belong to the group), but is rather one example in which I differed but clearly one that increased that sense a lot. Even more importantly, my parents made it a point to tell their kids that, eventually and essentially, we were (and have thus learned to be) responsible for our lives. And while this led to a certain amount of friction whenever we had gatherings with wider family, I must say I am tremendously grateful that I was allowed to explore the concept of self-determination at an early age!

When it comes to applying labels to other people, one of the most important reasons I can think of for doing so is that knowing certain “facts” about someone I interact with might help me in forming more accurate expectations concerning future outcomes of those interactions. For instance, knowing that someone is married with children may suggest that, in a certain situation, this person is more likely to behave in a certain manner. In short, the added value of applying a label to someone else is gaining a (false?) sense of increased certainty when it comes to predicting someone’s behavior.

An additional reason is that different aspects of identity help in forming social groups, which usually leads to group cohesion and an increase in the willingness to share resources or defend other group members against outside aggression. On average, I might be more willing and likely to help someone who shares certain characteristics with me, such as being gay, compared to someone who is different. And naturally, this also requires me to apply labels to myself…

But this comes at a potentially hefty price: first of all, if I apply a label to someone and then have stronger expectations for that person’s behavior, my own actions will reflect or at least incorporate part of those expectations. For instance, if I assume that someone is superficial and not interested in a serious conversation, I may very well start a small-talk and then, surprise, all we will ever talk about are relatively superficial topics. And when it comes to personal liberties, which is a much graver thought, as soon as labels have been sufficiently fixed, such as what “being gay” means, other properties like rights or specific privileges and restrictions become attached to this label or identity. In the case of (e.g. gay) rights, this could mean that if someone does not fully fit the label, as with bisexual people, they may or may not be granted those rights.

For me personally, applying a label to myself naturally means that I can or will “identify” with the label and whatever traits, actions, beliefs, and values that are usually associated with it. In a way, this gives me added security because I do not have to question myself in every aspect of my life all the time. But on the other hand it may also restrict my liberty. If, for instance, I identify with being Republican, I may feel a very strong urge and motivation to publicly defend some other Republican, even though without the labeling (or shared identity) I would not do so based on the other person’s character or actions.

Additionally, I am wondering: how stable is my identity? Obviously there are aspects that are factual, such as that I was born in Germany, a historic fact, or that I am white/caucasian, something that is in all likelihood true for the remainder of my life. But besides some few identities that are unlikely to change (or even unchangeable), I would argue that the entire “rest” is up for grabs. And there are a lot of possible identities to choose from, usually depending on the context. I could for instance identify as a member of Columbia University, and more specifically as a neuropsychology researcher at Columbia, as a Harlem resident, or more generally as a New Yorker, as politically left-leaning but with strong beliefs in personal liberties and responsibility, as someone in their mid-thirties, as a dependently-employed worker, as an Apple product user, as a fan of Natalie Portman, and so on. The list of potential identities is endless, and in a way it seems that each of them both adds to my sense of self while at the same time taking away the liberty to be the opposite. To be clear: each of these identities is usually only helpful in the context of contrast, like being a New Yorker in midst of people from Texas. Being a white man in his thirties among fellow mid-thirty caucasians isn’t a very “helpful” identity at all. Otherwise we could all just identify with being human and that’d be enough!

In the end, I guess that’s why, just like Rebecca Jordan-Young, I like to identify as queer. It is a “label” with a relatively strong notion of what it adds in terms of my sense of self, allowing me to be different and unpredictable, but more importantly not restricting me in any direction (other than being absolutely and dead-center average). So, yes, I love being queer!

Over the past week, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time “brooding” over the amount of debt the American people have accrued, both the nationally but also the privately held debt. It is almost as if I can literally feel that debt weighing down on me as well as on many other people. I even began by writing this very blog entry dedicated to putting together a lot of exact numbers–back in high school I was fairly good at math, maybe that’s why I liked the idea–but then I realized: it is actually relatively unimportant how large the debt exactly is. What matters is the effect that “being so deeply in debt” has on people. For the most part, I would say that being in debt comes with a feeling of “not being able to afford something I usually would want to get and could pay for”. And sometimes the things people cannot afford to buy can be very important things… But being as deep in debt as we are at the moment probably comes more with the feeling of being “owned” by whoever I am indebted to.

Naturally, there are still quite a few Americans who do not yet personally suffer from the effects of either the national debt or their personal debt, should they have some. At least the way in which they suffer is probably very subtle, almost invisible even, and has not yet reached levels that affect their day-to-day activities let alone their ability to buy enough food to live off. But there are yet ways in which this kind of indebtedness affects everybody: by reducing our freedom in a considerable way, slowly eroding it. My assumption is that, if the amount of debt keeps increasing, the American People will, in the end, be “enslaved” by policy decisions made solely based on fiscal arguments. Even in the current presidential race, few people seem to ask the question whether or not any of the budget items for which candidates suggest cuts are useful or essential. The fact that “we need to save money” seems like all that matters. And another aspect is that not only those people with little money and potentially monetary debt will be enslaved, but also those with considerable wealth will be enslaved to follow “the rules” the financial markets dictate.

I’m now trying to step back from any concrete problems and instead attempt to describe the intersection of the society and economy I live in as I see it… It seems a fair assessment that, based on the division of labor and the highly specialized processes required to produce many if not most of the goods we have grown used to, we simply need a way of ensuring that the wealth that is being produced by the people through some form of work is, somehow, distributed. And I want to make it clear that I do not refer to wealth only as physically graspable goods, such as food, clothing, or cars, but also other accomplishments that increase our general quality of life and welfare, like education, public safety, and the rule of law! On the other hand, I sometimes have very strong doubts that some of the services provided by parts of the financial industry can ever be described as “generating wealth” of any kind, at least not when it comes to “commonwealth”, which is just a translation of the word republic!

Over time, the pre-dominant way that developed to determine the distribution of goods and services, in general, is based on a token-based, free-market economy. In such an economy, goods and services are “swapped” for currency based on a price that is, at least in theory, determined by supply and demand, which then automatically provides each individual participant of the economy with the greatest value, hence maximizing the overall wealth. For one, it ensures that goods of “lesser value” with the same requirements for resource use are, over time, removed from the market place. Importantly, the reason this system is chosen by the government, the democratically elected representatives of a republic, is not to benefit the few and allow individuals to get rich, but rather so as to generate the greatest benefit for society as a whole! It is also important to take into account that if the profit margin of anyone providing services, such as in case of education, or producing goods, such as in assembling cars, becomes too great, the price should be considered too high, such that the general population certainly does not get the “greatest value” in return…

As far as I can see, this description does not contain any information on how the required currency is provided, nor does it give any detailed rules as to how some of the less individual but rather society-based desires can be satisfied. And at this point I would like to describe my most recent thoughts based on a few observations:

In almost all market-based economies, the idea of having a central bank, which is as far as possible from government influence, that provides the currency seems being considered as without alternative. To the extent to which I understand economics, this is however by far not a proven fact, but rather it is the currently favored, and thus accepted, hypothesis or model. While some past occurrences have indeed shown that by simply giving the right to create money to the executive branch of government can lead to disaster, I don’t think that any proof has been presented that would allow to draw the conclusion of the opposite, namely that putting money creation into the hands of privately run banks is necessarily “in the interest of the people or society”. And given that this privilege of creating money seems to come with at least “some power”, I must admit I am quite surprised that the Supreme Court of the United States hasn’t yet found that allowing private banks to “create money” is unconstitutional.

In addition to the idea that a central bank is organizing the monetary supply, the idea that interest has to be paid for a loan seems equally without alternative. And what’s more, in the current flavor of monetary lending practices, the interest is not only paid on the original loan, the principal, but on all subsequently accrued interest-based debt, that is to say compound interest, in other words a possibly exponential growth of debt. Funny enough, I would at least see several ways in which the currently existing system could be “extended”. I’m not necessarily saying that each of my thoughts would be an improvement, but to say that “things have to be the way they are” simply seems to easy. For one, Congress could set rules prohibiting extremely high interest rates beyond, say, 10 per cent. And in cases were such interest rates yet seem reasonable, such as where the risk for the borrower is indeed very great, legal provisions could enforce that interest rates have to decline over time automatically and that compound interest is only legal for very low interest rates. In other words: if my history demonstrates a high risk of me being a potentially defaulting loan recipient, I might initially have to pay a high interest rate, say 25%, but once I have made regular interest payments over a certain period of time, the interest rate either would have to be lowered substantially or, alternatively, any interest that was not paid will not be added to the amount on which I have to pay that interest rate, as this amount was not part of the initial risk of the borrower anyway. And finally, if someone giving out a loan makes some profit with receiving interest, I find it not only fair but essential that this person than also truly carries the risk in the case of a default on the loan.

Why do I see those issues as problematic to begin with? Well, starting with the second area that is not covered by the description of a free-market society, I would argue that there are many desires which a society might express as a whole rather than individually. For instance, in the United States some of these desires are put expressly into the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

I would argue that, naturally, the pursuit of happiness is certainly something every individual has, but on the other hand it might not be necessarily true that each individual wants to guarantee this for every other individual equally, which is why it was made something government shall try to achieve. In a way, this principle is somewhat contrary to the idea of some of the elements in our very economy insofar as competition, in the sense in which it is used in sports like the Olympics, requires equal chances and footing. Obviously if someone owns a lot of capital, mostly in form of currency liquidity, that person does not have to “struggle” as hard as someone else if they wish to pursue their happiness–or pursue anything else for that matter, so how can that be considered fair competition. Furthermore, it seems to me that while none of the people heading the “too big to fail banks” has been elected by “The People”, banks and other financial firms are beginning to exercise a great amount of influence over political decisions, to the point where I would question to what extent the actual government is still “in power”–and if that were not the case it would almost seem like a constitutional duty to attempt to abolish any form of government that has not been given the consent of the governed.

Now, please, don’t get me wrong. I’m not a fan of socialism or another kind of systems that wishes to simply “equalize” monetary means among participants of a given economy. But the idea that some participants of our economic system can consume goods and services in pursuit of their happiness simply by owning “excess capital” and living off interest payments made by others who require some of this excess capital to be able to participate in the economy at all seems not only strange but outright dangerously close to violating some of the principles the Founding Fathers wanted to see granted for every person living in the United States. The King of England was considered overbearing at the time, and in my mind at least the financial industry is playing an every more important role in how our daily lives are shaped.

As part of living in a society that, I would hope, is a civil society with a basis in the ideas of some of the greatest philosophers, my vision is that each and every member of society should participate on both sides: giving and taking. And the giving should not be limited to having one’s money “do the work”–which is a true misnomer in my opinion: money cannot work, it can simply be used to suck up someone else’s contribution to society in form of interest payments…

Do I see any hope? Well, yes, of course! But the vision I have would require people to give up quite a bit on the idea of “owning” an entitlement that is counted in forms of a dollar amount, at least when it comes to amounts that, by far, exceed what they could ever spend on regular consumption goods in the foreseeable future. So long as someone has the ability to “conserve” effort that was put into the economic system for very long periods, and pile up this conserved effort to ever higher mountains, the system will always carry an incalculable risk of failure. In that sense, I actually believe that re-designing some of the government-run programs, like Medicaid and Medicare, into a system that, within reasonable contraints, promises to pay for people’s basic needs and medical expenses when their insurance doesn’t cover for it or they simply don’t have an insurance, but that doesn’t do so in form of expressly stating dollar amounts is a necessary step to fix things. More generally, holders of U.S. Treasury Bonds would have to give up at least part of their entitlement, which next to Medicare and Medicaid also includes debt held by retirement funds, private investors, and investment firms.

But another big contribution that has to be made is that banks need to return to an actually useful business model: that of providing required services to society, not a way of providing the people working at banks with the means to get rich for their own sake, which then is rather a disservice to society. Financial capital is meant to serve the people, not the other way around…

Do I blame anyone involved? Not at all. If anything, I would say that the mantra of “if I just had a little more money, I’d be so much happier” works a bit like a virus. Once it infects our minds it almost is like taking over control of our lives. Involuntarily I am reminded of a movie from the 80s: They Live. A zombie-like world where many people have been brain-washed and are no longer seeking true happiness in their lives. And just as in the movie, at the very end, no-one in our society, not even someone who seemingly benefits from this way of organizing our economy, truly wins. Maybe we should step back a little from the numbers and think about what we, as a society, want our lives to look like, and what our government’s functions are supposed to be and then find ways for us to strive towards that goal and our government to fulfill those functions.

Working in a psychology lab focused on social cognitive neuroscience at Columbia University has allowed me to keep an eye out for answers to some very profound questions I have been asking myself for a long time, and even I don’t remember how long. One of these questions is, “how do you react to fear?” Incidentally, in one of the studies run at our lab, subjects were instructed to either react naturally to scary and pain inducing images or, alternatively, to try and put themselves into an accepting mindset, one in which the fear they were to experience simply would be allowed to exist. But more on that later…

Naturally, there are fears that better be reacted to, such as when an immediate threat enters our consciousness, and probably shortly before that it enters our subconscious, and our bodies are, almost automatically, set in motion to either avoid the threat, like dodging an oncoming car when we step onto a street we erroneously thought was empty, or to try and neutralize the threat, like taking aim and trying to thwart an insect we assume has the capacity to inflict pain or spread disease.

This kind of instinctive program, the fight-or-flight response, is still very strong and powerful in our species, and, at least in the here and now, for good reason. But humans have also evolved quite a bit further, and something else is by now “added to the program”, something that I believe is at the center of the human condition: we know that no matter how much we struggle for life, and no matter how well we adapt this fight-or-flight response, in the end we cannot win. We are, one could say, doomed to die. Obviously, I am not the only one talking about this: for instance, in a 2003 documentary, “Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality”, something I can recommend as worth watching, for instance at Netflix, film makers explore this question together with psychologist and anthropologists.

The paradoxical condition we find ourselves in can, I think, be characterized by those two elements and a twist: our instincts and intuitive responses, almost immutably, compel us to react to threatening cues in the environment such as to preserve our lives. But at the same time we have foreknowledge, and this is one of the very few things I would say most people agree we know with the highest degree of certainty, that one day must come when we will die. If the two layers in our minds–the subconscious effort to preserve life and the conscious knowledge that we must, eventually, fail–were separate entities, operating side by side, maybe we didn’t have to suffer. And here is where the twist comes in: conscious thought has the ability to generate subconscious states. And this is also true for future events, even if the details of these events aren’t yet available. Thinking about or being reminded of our mortality generates, even unbeknownst to us, a state in which we are more likely to pick up the fight. Which is also why we can be excited in light of anticipating a positive event.

So, if this reaction of fear is in the subconscious whenever we think about death, is there any hope of ever finding peace? Well, here is where I would want to add to the movie by presenting some, admittedly preliminary and not yet published evidence from the study in our lab: being accepting of one’s fear, that is to say allowing oneself to experience fear but doing so not with the intention of reacting, that is to say taking a path outside of fight-or-flight, seems to have the effect of lowering the actual impact of that fear. In other words, by consciously deciding not to react to a threatening cue in the environment, but rather acceptingly experiencing its impact, we are, at least partially, able to mitigate its emotional consequences and, possibly, lower its “call for action”, something that still needs to be studies in depth…

I recently posted on this blog about why I love living in the U.S.A. And there isn’t really anything I feel I have to take back about this post. But… The instinct of preserving life has become something that, as an outsider, I would almost call ever-present, all-trumping, an obsession. The debate on abortion, something I also posted on already, is one example. Good people are fighting one another over when life begins, probably driven by, on the pro-life side, the fear of their own mortality. Another and potentially much more dangerous example is the American notion of protecting life world-wide. The reason why conservatives want to stock-pile weapons and bombs is not to destroy life but to protect it–how could you, without a good ace up your sleeve should life become threatened, right? But, as the documentary movie so aptly puts: the desire to protect one’s life has the subconscious effect of increasing the impulse to fight, and then of course fight those who seem to have a different world view, as that is what threatens our way of life. In short, this is a vicious circle, one that evolution unfortunately didn’t see coming… And I must admit it would be very unfortunate if the human condition is one where the instinct to preserve life is, in the end, what destroys it.

My own vision? If we could just all accept some realities, such as that people have different religions and world views, and that we all will die, then, maybe, we can all share this reality and have wonderful experiences together, and at least reduce the suffering caused by this truly and ultimately useless fight.

There is yet little scientific basis for my vision, but I am hopeful that someone out there might feel this is worth exploring: can accepting the fear that comes with the foreknowledge of death reduce the impulse to fight? And if the impulse is reduced, what are the consequences practically.

Outside of science, in thoughts people post online as well as in revered literature, there is of course ample “evidence” that others have thought of this before, and that I am not the only one with this vision. I want to share two examples:

Midnight Reflection: If life was the ultimate game, I would rather prefer to loose. Because winning dehumanizes my true ethical being. In other words, being the king of the world also means losing everything else. And that “everything else” is what makes me a compassionate human being.

And I take the liberty to copy and paraphrase from the comment I made to that post… Aren’t we all losers? Then again, can’t we also be champions? At least potentially? This much we know: we are guaranteed to die! Unfortunately, for most people it seems that life is about fighting death, fighting mortality, which is to say they simply react to their emotion of fear, although this fear is entirely caused by imagining the future, a future in which they no longer exist.

This struggle causes so much pain and suffering, and for as long as we literally suffer from the illusion we could ever win this fight, I do believe we cannot be truly human. So, to be a champion, one must accept that, in the very end, the fight must be lost–but, equally, fight we must, as life preserves itself through instinct!

To borrow another image from someone whose books have been read by millions, I want to quote J.K. Rowling, who has her title character Harry Potter think and experience the following (J.K. Rowling. “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”, p. 512):

But he understood at last what Dumbledore had been trying to tell him. It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew – and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents – that there was all the difference in the world.

So, yes, the true champion walks into the arena of life, knowing the fight will be lost, but with his head held high, accepting the inevitable but not despairing. And, to extend on that image a bit, that championship is exactly what Harry achieves, when he walks through the Forbidden Forest to meet his own death: you know what’s coming, death, but you still face it with dignity and humanity!

If we just, in our own lives, were accepting a bit more of the fact that, one day, we will no longer exist, and take it with a bit more “Buddhism” in our hearts and minds, not fighting it, but enjoying life while it lasts, maybe we would discover that the differences between cultures and ways of life are not reason enough to die for…

So far I have avoided blogging about a topic in the overlap region between politics and and economics. But after watching a couple of YouTube videos I found on the website of Prof. Franz Hörmann, I have repeatedly asked myself the following question: if I were an American Citizen already and had the option to participate in the Presidential Elections come November, would I vote for Barack Obama? Do I truly believe that Obama is good for the American Economy? And if not, would Mitt Romney be better?

Well, I honestly cannot answer the question about who I’d vote for with certainty. I mean, really, who knows with absolute certainty who they will vote for anyway, if there are still weeks ahead with the potential to reveal important information pertaining both candidates… Yet, I have at least found my disappointment with the current President grow into a sense of disillusionment over the past few months. Here are my thoughts on why I would at least feel much less inclined to be voting for Obama, and why I think that, ultimately, Obama isn’t the President to spearhead the changes necessary to find a way to make a free-market economy work for the benefit of all Americans. What America needs is a President who is not afraid to stand up to the forces that have invaded, pervaded, and perverted the political process, transforming it into something similar to a anchor-hosted regular television show where two supposedly opposing teams vie for “who’s the fairest of them all”.

As far as I can see, the problem is systemic in nature. And my guess is that many people “in power”, both in politics as well as in financial institutions, are at least subconsciously aware of the fact that there is a problem waiting to blow up. Maybe some even have a good idea what the problem is, but it seems that, so far, playing by the established rules seems the preferable choice, and I can see several very good reasons why it seems that way… So, what is the problem?

In short: We, The People, have over time gotten accustomed to how the monetary system is organized to a degree that even just thinking about possible alternatives comes across as “communist”–which is maybe just a different way of saying something like “crazy”, “impossible”, or “un-American”. Furthermore, some of the collectively held beliefs about money are simply false but, given that they support the current system to a degree that were they to be questioned the economy might collapse, no-one dares to bring this up. Let’s start maybe with some of the reasons why we (think we) need money:

Exchanging goods in a free-market economy is simply impractical without a form of currency, some representational good that can be converted into any other good or service we require. In addition, based on the fact that the “good or service” we contribute to society, usually in form of performing well at a job, leads to the acquisition of only relatively small amounts of currency units at a time, an economy with a monetary exchange function gives the opportunity to “save” some units of currency for future transactions, in other words to delay consumption in favor of “investment”. Naturally, for this to work reasonably well, people must have faith and be willing to trust that the value of their savings will not decline too much, and this trust has to be earned, to some degree, by the experience of stable prices.

If those were the only functions of money, we probably wouldn’t be anywhere near this economic mess we are faced with at the moment though. So, what are the problems in the current system? Well, I can see a few of them, and some are probably mixed up, but I will try to single out the root as far as I understand the matter:

But first it is important to know that the control over the monetary system does not lie directly with the people or their representatives, but instead, at least in the U.S. economy, with the Federal Reserve, a public entity which all the same states on its website that, quote, “its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government”. While that in itself may not necessarily be a problem, so long as this entity is given a clear set of instructions and its performance is more or less closely monitored by the sovereign’s representatives, it means that the control over monetary policy is, for some reason, not considered something worth putting into the hand of the elected representatives. One of the typical arguments given is that if the government were allowed to print money, it could increase spending without limits. The misconception in this statement lies in the understanding of where inflation, the loss of value per unit of currency, comes from.

The real problem, I think, lies with the fact that while the central bank, the Federal Reserve, provides the economy with “physical” currency, every regular bank and every mortgage lender creates money out of nothing every time a loan is made. You don’t believe it? Well, here is how it works: if I go to my bank tomorrow and request a loan over $100,000 and the loan is granted, all the bank needs to do is add $100,000 to the number on file in a computer, my account, and that’s it. Well, not quite. In return for this generous act of creating $100,000, I must promise to pay back the money, which the bank generated out of nothing, and pay it back with interest. This promise is a debt the bank puts into their books as well. But from the day the number is added to my account, I have to pay interest, whether or not I convert this number into physical currency or not. And the true problem with this system lies in the fact that to pay back the money with interest, the total amount of money has to increase. And the amount by which it has to increase in any given amount of time, the interest rate, is not controlled by anyone, not even the central bank! It is “set” by the “market”, but in a free-market economy you have supply and demand, but since the money I took out on the loan didn’t even exist before I took it, the supply is endless, and the price should be much lower.

Also, the total amount of money in all regular banks must grow, regardless of whether and how it is spent, simply by the fact that it exists (in the banks’ computers). And given that banks have very little motivation in having people pay back their loans early, as that would lower their profits, both the interest rate as well as the suggested payments are in favor of prolonging the loan term and bank profits.

Now, it is often argued that the interest rate is the price for the risk of the bank, but what exactly is that risk? Given that the money was generated out of thin air only at the time the loan was made, the risk only materializes in the case of a default of the lender, in which case the promise the bank has put into their books has to be written off. But the people running the bank are unlikely to be personally liable should the case occur that a huge number of people default all at once. This has led, in the past, to the incentive of giving out more and more loans even to people who the banks sort of had to know would not be able to keep their promise of paying back the loan, because the risk is deferred to the future, and only threatens the bank, but not the people making the bad decisions. And to top it all off, those “bad loans” were then bundled together into “good packages” and re-sold to investors who wanted to put their profits, in part coming from interest payments of people already in debt of course, to “good use”.

Given that it is not the interest rate the Federal Reserve charges for central bank money but rather the average interest rate of lenders that determines the amount of additional money required in the system, any inflation that occurs–that is to say the ratio between money in existence and all available goods produced by an economy in a given time–remains largely invisible to the people, until the point comes when those who have profited from the system were to try and “cash out”. And until that point comes, those who “have” will always become those who “have more” and vice versa… In other words, while the current system lasts, all but those “invested” in financial market products will become disenfranchised over time. Even big industry players are suffering from this, which might be one of the reasons for the Koch brothers to support the Tea Party rather than the GOP establishment.

Finally, the belief that our economy is a free market driven by supply and demand is incorrect in at least two regards: First, money cannot be scarce, given that it is created by banks whenever a loan is taken out. And to pretend otherwise so as to keep people in the mood of paying a high price for it is, in my eyes, simply unethical. Second, if people truly had a choice about what “work” they could “offer” on the market, my guess is that certain jobs would pay much better than they do. And the reason that they don’t pay better doesn’t lie in the supply of those services or, put more accurately, in the willingness to do so, but rather in the fact that they seemingly do not require highly specialized training.

Given that our current economy requires people to sell their “workforce” to either acquire currency (cash) or the “right” to obtain money from a bank by having someone “deposit” money into their account, this in the end leads to the potential for a modern-day slavery system, where those people without preexisting means, such as owning monetary wealth or other ways to generate income, or specialized knowledge are essentially forced to sell their workforce at “market value”, which in a industrialized economy drops to ever lower amounts if those who can offer unprivileged services increase in number.

But contrary to talent-searching shows on TV, people who really matter in our daily lives, such as policemen, teachers, security guards, or simply the person who always holds the door open when someone doesn’t have a free hand to do it themselves, will never appear during prime-time, and yet it is those people who truly make our lives better. If our economy were to go through another recession, which it very well might if the burden of debt isn’t brought down to bearable levels, who is going to have a greater impact on my life with their talents? Some “talented” rich kid with the added bonus of being able to impeccably smile in front of the cameras, or yet the hard-working, honest average American who does not expect the system to provide luxury but a simply a decent way of living? I put my bet on the latter “talent” any old time!

And as long as the political debate solely focuses on how to improve the economy for those who are already in power and well off, the general population will hardly ever see any real improvement. So, who would I vote for? At the moment I would say: I wouldn’t vote at all. Maybe if enough people send the message that neither candidate is worthy to lead America out of this mess, the required momentum to rebuild the political process and debate from the bottom up will finally come together. But it seems that we rather prefer to support a broken system based on partially false beliefs, because that way we can at least dream of being rich, instead of being free and happy. What did the Declaration of Independence say again…? I think I have to do some reading!